James Cain is another great one of the hard-boiled school, though not generally detective stuff.
I was also going to suggest Elmore Leonard and Tom Clancy—maybe some Ray Bradbury or early Robert Heinlein, too.
I haven’t read Frederick Forsythe’s The Dogs of War yet, though I’ve heard good things about it. Actually pretending to arrange a mercenary coup against a real country as a cover story for researching your novel seems “manly” enough.
I can probably think up some more esoteric (or just weirder) picks, too, if I did a little digging…Glen Cook’s Black Company series comes to mind.
I will once again recommend just about anything by Paul Quarrington, who had a great gift for writing funny & sensitive stuff in accessible prose, often loosely based on historical figures of varying fame or obscurity, and making frequent use of sports as overarching metaphor in a way that is not insulting to intelligent people.
I particularly recommend:
Home Game. set in the 1940s and featuring a vitally important baseball game between a group of religious extremists and a troupe of stranded circus freaks (recognizable to film fans) who have a ringer you may not recognize until late in the book.
King Leary, about a senescent Golden Age hockey hall-of-famer and his lifelong friend, out of a nursing home in order to film a Canada Dry ad. Shit gets real.
Whale Music, in which a guy whose life parallels Brian Wilson’s quite a bit is roused from his druggy stupor by the appearance of a naked alien from the planet Toronto. (Also a minor motion picture!)
Wow. More than enough to start here. Thank you for the responses everyone.
The Sherlock Holmes stories are much more accessible and enjoyable than you’d expect for period genre fiction. Some of them are short stories too. And they’re all out of copyright so available online, free!
I don’t think your problem is what you’re reading, your problem is yourself.
Someone who doesn’t like reading doesn’t suddenly find the magic book that makes them love reading for ever and ever.
It is. And come to think of it, I was in a very similar situation when I first read it. When I was young I read everything I could get my hands on, but once I got to high school and the required reading hit about 20+ books a year I lost all interest in fiction. After college I would try to get myself to start reading again, but nothing ever took. It still felt like an interminable slog. I was just trying to get through the book.
It was after the 4th or 5th time that my uncle recommended Dunces to me that I finally picked it up. It grabbed me from the first paragraph and I could not put it down. It was so vibrant and descriptive that it didn’t feel so much like reading as much as playing a movie in my mind.
The point I’m trying to make is this: Dunces may or may not have the same effect on you, but some book will. You will open a book that hooks you within the first few pages and while burning through that book you will realize what leisure reading is all about. It’s supposed to be enjoyable and engaging. If it’s not it’s OK to put the book down and start on something else.
Good luck in your search and let us know how it goes.
Totally. And if you like Holmes, there are many, many very good pastiches out there–everything from straight-up canon-style to sci fi to fantasy to horror (I like the horror ones, myself–Gaslight Grimoireand Gaslight Grotesque have some good ones. Also, Holmes and steampunk work really well together.
Any of Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole/Joe Pike adventures.
A few from the UK:
Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre - hedonistic journalist solves murder in Edinburgh, humor ensues.
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh - heroin addict in Edinburgh tries to get clean, humor ensues.
The Damned Utd by David Peace - fictionalized account of Brian Clough’s crash-and-burn tenure at Leeds United, sacking ensues.
Any hard-boiled detective fiction will do.
Try The Maltese Falcon.
Robert Crais (L.A. detective and his near superhuman sidekick Joe Pike).
Ed McBain - NYC (fictional) 27th Precinct police procedurals, addictive as potato chips and there are a million of them!
Phillip K. Dick - science fiction and oddities.